Tag Archives: Spontaneous City

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from the URBZ team, explaining the project “Homegrown cities” that they are developing in the city of Mumbai. Their thinking on the future of the cities is very much related with ideas treated in this blog, starting from the user to create a “user-generated city”.

I find their work really interesting and inspiring, so I asked them for an article to publish in the blog, changing the format of a usual entry at OSU and, hopefully, opening the blog to more extensive collaborations with outside the box urban thinkers:

Finishing with the lecture series “Urbanists Talk” that the NAi has been organized within the 5th IABR Making City, is the turn of Gert Urhahn, who made his speech after Pablo Allard on June 7th.

Gert Urhahn was Senior Urban Designer for the Municipality of Amsterdam between 1985 and 1990. He founded Urhahn Urban Design in 1991 and have been particularly experienced in renewal strategies for harbour and waterfront related projects. He is specialized in complex assignments where various stakeholders are together aiming to find a sound and tailor-made solution, as a senior designer or as supervisor is a member of the International Federation for Housing and Planning (IFHP) and of the advisory body of the Amsterdam council (ARS).

After a time working on projects for cities like Hong Kong or Shenzhen trying; mainly, to understand its scale and its way of working, is possible to get to the conclusion that in terms of mobility, density and even architectural typology, the terms used until now to define a city are becoming obsolete.

We are in front of something different, which stopped being a city, at least just one, to become a multi-nucleus network, a new concept, a syncytium.

Recently published, the book “The Spontaneous City” (Urhahn Urban Design, BIS Publishers) is a strong statement about the future of Urbanism. Though I am still going trough its pages, I think the interesting manifesto that opens the publication deserves a post, since in it I have found many ideas related to an open source urban design.

In the manifesto, the authors propose a change in the traditional urban planning, a new starting point by taking the city as a “marketplace” in which supply and demand from users sculpts urban form.